I agree that the ACC didn't have either school on the radar
in 2004. The primary reason I included Rutgers was to use as leverage with Penn State. Although having Rutgers in the ACC may not be that bad from a football standpoint. The ACC could rotate its football conference championship game between NYC, Balt/DC, Charlotte, and Orlando. Also keep in mind the failure of the WAC 16 member experiment was still fresh in people's minds. Back then it was known one of the failures was a lack of TV. If a conference was going to expand to 14 or 16 members back then, then one of the end products would need to be a conference network. The ACC would have been the best basketball conference since the Big East would have been crippled. A ripple effect could have been that UConn would have been forced to vamp up its football program more quickly than originally planned. If UConn had gone down that route, then they would have been a more desirable option if a school ever left the ACC for another conference. Also, the state may have decided to keep UConn's on-campus football stadium instead of building a new stadium in East Hartford and a multi-million dollar basketball practice facility where the football stadium once stood.
I realize what I have been proposing is bold. Maybe even very bold in a few places. However, if a conference wants to be the leader of the pack or a commissioner wants to be consider a visionary, then it requires making bold moves at times. Instead the ACC allowed other conferences to make the first and it has been playing catch up ever since.
If Swofford ends up being a visionary on the next evolution of content distribution, then it will be interesting to see what type of long-term dividends it pays for the ACC. If it doesn't pay the kind the dividends that the Big Ten saw from being the first conference with its own network or the SEC being the first conference to host a CCG, then it will be interesting to see the reaction from the fanbases. Hopefully it isn't a bitter sweet one because the ACC didn't capitalize on the "Golden Age of Dividends" (aka 1990-2006).
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In response to this post by HOO86)
Posted: 06/06/2017 at 4:27PM